I'm back to working on my small 5 Meter dome,
http://starship-enterprises.net/spraypercrete/
after a break to work on the now postponed ug dome.
I have to take a few days to put together a ten meter dome that is going to Italy to become a planetarium. It is going to cost more and take a lot longer to get there than it will take to buy the material and fabricate the dome. I guess the rich Europeans are checking out the bargains in economically disadvantaged countries like US.
Still using the spray washer and a drum with about ten 5/16" holes in the bottom of the sides. It doesn't leak much while mixing but if I let it sit 8-12 hours all the excess water drains off and that's a few hundred pounds I don't have to move by hand. I've gotten in the habit of pulping a couple of barrels full late in the day (not hard work) to use the next morning before it gets hot(ter). From there I'm mixing in the portland cement by hand, then dumping or bucketing it into the forms, preferably between midnight and dawn and certainly no later than ten AM. It got down to the low 70's this morning before dawn, then topped out at about 95 before the winds hit in mid afternoon. Now it's a hot sandy blast furnace out there. Good time to come read email : )
Oh, another small project/experiment. I had a couple of satellite dishes lying around, the small oval ones. A couple of days ago I slapped papercrete a couple of inches thick on the dish, using the dish to make a parabolic surface. After it gets really well cured then I will attach small mirrors to use it as a solar concentrator. Why not just use the metal dish covered with mirrors? Because it's not papercrete! No, really because I can make several pc dishes from the same mold and then I'll have several to experiment with. I already covered one with aluminum tape and set a 1x2 on fire in less than a minute, so I'm pretty sure it'll warm a cup of tea with 1" square mirrors as a better reflector than the aluminum tape.
Spaceman
slurryguy wrote:
Warm weather has arrived. I bet quite a few people will be slopping some slurry around. What specific project are you making? No project is too small. Have any pictures of your active project so far?
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